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2.1.1-Doeskin-pantaloons
Brick!Club 2.1.1: What is met with on the Way from Nivelles (The excitement of writing 2 rather than 1 at the start of the heading only a Brick!Clubber can understand this.) I spent way too much of this evening researching Waterloo, and I am now surrounded on all sides by maps and articles and retellings and photographs and pictures of wargames. (Thank you also to the Brick!Clubbers who posted photos because now I really want to go to Belgium guys dammit.) I am so ready. Somebody, somewhere, suggested that Waterloo would be the feels-free section of the novel. Oh how you lied! Despite it being the standard section (along with the convent, and the sewers) that people complain about in this lovely book, I have actually been really excited about this section coming up. And it is so not feels-free. I don’t have profound analysis for this chapter, but I feel like it’s just setting you up for flashbacks. Like, if somebody could write traumatic-flashbacks-in-a-tranquil-setting, well yep, here it is. We have more nature descriptions than you can poke a stick at, and then we get the nice little rural inn, and that’s all going really well, but oh look there’s a hole in the wall, and what? it was made by a cannon ball? He was on the battle-field of Waterloo. Cue flashbacks. Obviously, people more intelligent than I have already discussed the notions of history being buried - chiefly in the context of Fantine, who has just been interred in a pauper’s grave. But the thing that gets me is (I hope I can word this without offending anyone) one wouldn’t expect Fantine to be remembered. Her life was important to her, and Valjean, and Simplice, but they were about the only people in the world that she mattered to. She grew up a street kid, she became a factory worker, and then a prostitute, and then she died. By contrast, at Waterloo, you have one of the most famous battles of history, and you’ve got what you might call history’s ‘great men’ - people like Wellington and Napoleon - in one of the most important moments of their lives, and we know from future chapters that there are you traditional moments of heroism and historical glory coming up: tragic, brave death on the battlefield and cavalry charges and the reinforcements turning up at the last moment to save the day… And people would think, you know, that giving yourself up into prostitution for your daughter mightn’t get you remembered, but if something is going to put your name down in history, it’s going to be this. It’s going to be glory and guns and bloodshed and battles. And fifty years later, nobody cares. (Sorry I kind of went on a rant but Waterloo feels and it’s only chapter one…) Commentary Pilferingapples I THINK THAT SOMEONE WAS ME, a young foolish me before the club got underway. But yeah, “Fifty years later, nobody cares.” All that death and horror and it’s a three-franc tour to look at the landscape and that’s it. …I can’t decide if I’m horrified by this, or glad to think that life heals itself up around such scars, and if I feel satisfied or appalled that all the soldiers in ground, all those voices drifting out of the well, ultimately share the same common grave as Fantine. Does this criticize the way people move on? Or is Fantine, is everyone in the pauper’s grave, equally sanctified by being buried in this common earth— are they all equal martyrs for the faults of their country? I DON’T EVEN KNOW, but Waterloo kind of killed me and this was THE FIRST CHAPTER.